Family Recipe Friday - French-Canadian Baked Beans

This week I made another dish handed down from my French Canadian ancestors. Baked Beans are very popular in our family. Fèves au lard is traditional beans baked in a ceramic or cast-iron pot usually flavoured with salted pork or lard and sweetened with maple sugar.

The historical background for Quebec cuisine is generated from the fur trade, where many dishes contributed a high fat or lard content providing high energy in the middle of the cold winter. The strongest influence of traditional Quebec cuisine comes from France and Ireland, the two largest ethnic groups in the province. Many aspects of Canadian aboriginal cuisine also had considerable impact on Quebec cuisine.

Folklore suggests that sailors brought cassoulet from the south of France, once in Quebec they were adapted with available ingredients and emerged into the French-Canadian culinary tradition we are familiar with today.

Maple sugar season in Quebec is one of the oldest culinary traditions. In the spring, many sugar shacks offer traditional meals of eggs, baked beans and ham all drizzled in maple syrup. Boiled maple tree sap is poured over the snow, which then hardens and is eaten as a treat.

The following is my family's recipe for baked beans. It has been adapted over the years so I often will replace the lard and cook a roast of pork in the beans, or replace the brown sugar with maple syrup. Maple syrup is expensive so a combination of syrup and brown sugar is also a great combination.

3 comments:

I make Boston Baked beans every winter (since I'm only 35 miles from Boston!) and they must bake for six or seven hours in a low oven. Why the time difference? These days I worry about the energy loss in running the oven all day long. Maybe I'll try your recipe next, and see what the family thinks!

Heather, do you boil them first, if not that would be the difference. If mine bake too long, they will become dry and mushy. So you don't want to overcook these.@ Danette, I await your results, make my mother proud.

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